Synthetic Civilizations

Synthetic civilization is a term coined here to represent what happens to an alien civilization after it becomes filled with intelligent things: AI robots, disembodied AI with only an interface to the world, intelligent created organisms for anything, new species of aliens created by design or even something beyond species, just individual creatures created by designing a genetic code and then growing it in some industrial or biological factory. It is hard for us to imagine such a civilization, as our only experience has been with us as the only intelligent creatures, and we are evolved organisms, not something designed by some mind and then brought to fruition.

We can fairly easily imagine the first few generations of this society, where the laws are legacy laws, and the evolved aliens own everything, and the robots just work. But after a while, this hierarchy might dissolve. The evolved aliens might start looking more and more different, as a better understanding of the genetic code is obtained, and more possibilities of variations are possible. Then when the aliens start introducing intelligence into other animals, such as their pets, things start to get weird. Making something like intelligent horses, dogs, monkeys, cats or whatever existed in the alien society leads to the idea of a granting of rights to anything intelligent. Some bright alien is sure to think of granting the same rights to robots whose AI puts them at the level of an alien.

Exactly what rights would there be? Here on Earth we think of rights as permission to vote for representatives or leaders, but would there be any representatives in a synthetic civilization? Who would govern it, or better, who would make allocation decisions as to how much of the energy of the civilization would go to infrastructure maintenance, providing services, keeping up the flows of air, water, food and whatever else the society distributes, transportation and all the rest. Why would there be anyone governing it? If the civilization has been static for centuries, they would know just how much energy to allocate to each sector, and how to distribute it further. With a many centuries old civilization, there isn’t any need to change anything. Nothing is growing and nothing is shrinking, except available resources, and that might be shrinking very slowly due to extensive recycling and re-use.

In an age-old civilization, there is no need to campaign for more of this or that, as the allocation decisions have been made centuries before, and each generation, or issue for robots, just steps into the shoes of the previous one. Perhaps it took them a few centuries to figure out what was optimal, but after that time, nobody needs to question anything in the allocation area, as the data of many decades and centuries indicates just how it should be. So, there is no point to having representatives, and no point to having leaders, and no decisions are being made except for the default decision to just keep going onward.

Did some natural phenomena happen that disrupted something? They would just work to minimize the effects like they did with the last fifty similar ones. Was there an unexpected failure of some infrastructure component, like an energy distribution node? Just do what was done for the last few hundred failures of this type. Backup that is appropriate would be in place already, and any organisms needed for repairs would be available.

Could anyone tell if an intello had rights or not? Could a robot recognize if he had less rights than a biological organism? If there aren’t any discernable rights, there would be no differences, and so the existence of some legacy document, undoubtedly electronic, giving equal rights to various things would be irrelevant in the extreme.

What about employment rights? Most likely, employment would be vastly different in a synthetic civilization. Would some new version of an alien want to work in manufacturing? Manufacturing would likely be wholly automated, under the control of an AI in a box somewhere. Would this alien want to have the process de-automated so he/she/it could sit at a factory bench assembling something? It doesn’t make sense. Would this alien want to work in food production? The food production factory is likely to be as automated as the manufacturing facility, and might be populated with specialized organisms with senses designed to detect the condition of the various biological processes going on to produce nutritious substances. No space for the alien here. Would this alien want to work in sales, when everything is done online or some more subtle prediction mechanism. Each habitat for an alien might be automatically equipped with all the necessary items, so no shopping was required.

Perhaps there are some employment slots in the synthetic civilization. They would likely be places for experiencing what it was like to work, and the occupiers of the slots might simply rotate, or be chosen by lottery. Why would a particular alien be excluded from this rotation cycle or lottery? If they could fit the slot, what would be the point? There might be no aliens on their home planet with identical genes, although the majority of their genes might be the same, if there is an optimal set of choices.

Could a robot perform the activities of this make-work slot? If so, could it fill it if it wanted to? Why would it want to?

It would appear that a synthetic civilization is like what has been imagined for an advanced alien civilization in previous posts, that there is no need for employment, but it might be done for some other reasons. If the reason involves gaining experiences, there would be no need for a robot to do this unless the robot had a brain like the biological brains of the aliens, that is, with neural nets that rely on associations to function. If the robot brain is more like an expert system, with predictable outcomes, then experiences could simply be downloaded rather than gathered in real time.

This example sheds a bit of light on how to envisage a synthetic civilization. What is necessary is to understand what differences in the organisms, including robots and hybrids, would have an effect on how they existed within the civilization, including what roles they would play. Coming up with a self-consistent vision of the lives of different organisms is a difficult task, and chipping away at it bit by bit might be the only way to get to it.